Saturday, March 5, 2016

In his creatively humorous January 11, 2016 column titled
“Our Elders have Gone Mad Again,” my brother and senior colleague Mr. Tunde
Asaju joked that I "insist" that America "should not be called
God’s Own Country." Several people who didn’t understand the inventive tongue-in-cheek
humor in Mr. Asaju’s writing wrote to ask why I "dissed" my host
country by saying people shouldn’t call it "God's own country."

Welcome signs like this are the reason Nigerians think America calls itself "God's own country"

Since it seems most people have no capacity to tell satire
from fact, I thought I should clarify that it is not I who said America should
not be called “God’s own country”; America does NOT, and has NEVER, referred to
itself as “God’s own country.” It is only Nigerians who call America “God’s own
country”—and who think and claim that America calls itself “God’s own country.”
Asaju was only calling attention to an article I wrote on March 12, 2011
debunking the mistaken notion that America’s national motto is “God’s own country.”

In the more than one decade that I have lived here, I have
never come across a single American who is even faintly familiar with the idea
that America is called “God’s own country”! And I have traveled to more than 30
of America’s 50 states. I have traveled to northern, southern, western, and
eastern states of this country, and have actually taken the trouble to ask most
of the people I have interacted with if they recognize the phrase “God’s own
country” as their national slogan. Almost always, my question elicited
quizzical looks. “God’s own what? Never heard of that!” That’s the standard
response I often get.

But what is even more
perplexing, for me, is the fact that only Nigerians think— and say—that
America’s national motto is “God’s own country.” I have asked many of my
Caribbean, South American, Middle Eastern, and Asian friends here if they know
America to be “God’s own country.” None of them has ever heard America identified
with that slogan. So why are Nigerians the only people on earth who call
America “God’s own country”? How did Nigerians come to associate that term
exclusively with the United States?

I don’t know, but my sense is that it is the result of a
literal understanding of American idiomatic English by Nigerians. In American
English, the phrase “God’s country” simply means “one’s own homeland,” that is,
the place where one was born and raised, as in: “Welcome to God’s own country,
and we hope you will enjoy your stay among us.” It can also mean “an isolated
rural area,” or a naturally beautiful area, especially in the countryside. Many
isolated rural communities in America welcome visitors to “God’s own country.” ("Country" means "rural area.") But the idiom has fallen into disuse among younger Americans.

This sign tells the real meaning of "God's own country" in American English

I asked students in all three classes I teach this semester
if they knew the meaning of—or ever heard—the expression “God’s own country.”
None has ever heard of the expression, much less know what it means. The only
student who has any familiarity with the expression was a Nigerian-American who
said, to laughter, “that’s what my parents, and I guess Nigerians in general,
think America calls itself!”

My guess is that early Nigerian visitors to America mistook
the old American English idiomatic expression “welcome to God’s own country,”
which they probably encountered in many parts of the country, as evidence that
the country called itself “God’s own country” and brought back that mistaken
notion to Nigeria. But this begs the question why only Nigerians understood—and
still understand—that expression literally.

My second theory is that Nigerians associate the phrase with
America because of the false attraction of the somewhat similar-sounding phrase
“In God we trust,” which has been inscribed on American coin currencies since
the 1860s and on its paper currencies since 1957. It was also adopted as
America’s official motto in 1956. It has been (unsuccessfully) challenged by
American secularists and atheists, although a 2003 Gallup poll found that 90
percent of Americans approve of it.

Nonetheless, New Zealand is actually the first country in
the world to officially refer to itself as “God’s own country.” The phrase was
introduced to the country by Thomas Bracken, one of New Zealand’s most
influential poets and journalists who also had the distinction of being the
sole author of his country’s national anthem.

New Zealand is the first country to adopt "God's own country" as its official national motto

According to the Encyclopedia
of New Zealand, “God’s own country” first appeared in Bracken’s last major
book titled Lays and lyrics: God's Own
Country and Other Poems, which was published in 1893, six years before his
death. New Zealand’s longest-serving and most influential Prime Minister,
Richard John Seddon, who ruled the country from April 1893 to June 1906, was
intrigued by the phrase “God’s own country” in the title of Bracken’s book. So,
in 1893, he adopted it and gave it governmental imprimatur as New Zealand’s
motto.

Years later, Australia, New Zealand’s closest neighbor to
the southeast, “stole” the slogan. In the 1970s, Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe was then
called, also called itself “God’s own country” in acknowledgement of its
stunning scenic splendor. But after independence in 1980, the motto was
dropped. Other places that used to or still call themselves “God’s own country”
are Ireland and England’s Yorkshire County (which sometimes renders the phrase
as “God’s own county”).

But the part of the world that is now more popularly known
by the “God’s own country” tagline than even New Zealand is India’s Kerala
State, located in the southern part of the country. It adopted the tagline
“Kerala—God’s own country” in the 1990s in its bid to attract and boost
international tourism. The National
Geographic Traveler, a well-regarded US-based international tourism
magazine published by the National Geographic Society, named Kerala one of the
“ten paradises of the world” and “50 places of a lifetime.”

During America’s
Civil War between 1861 and 1865, the northern army (often called the Union
troops in American history books) who were fighting southern secessionists
usually called their homeland, that is, the American north, “God’s
country.” This was perhaps intended to
slight the south.

The phrase was at best a self-important regional label that
also signifies notions of homeland and rural beauty; at no time did it refer to
the whole of the United States. It is not clear if New Zealand’s Bracken
“stole” the phrase from the American Union troops since they used it earlier
than he did. From my point of view, however, this seems improbable given the
vast geographic distance between America and New Zealand, not to talk of the
sluggish pace of informational flows at the time.

But it suffices to
state that many contemporary Americans have no memories of this Civil War-era
reference to the American north as “God’s own country,” and never ever refer to
their whole country as such, contrary to what many Nigerians believe.

Subscribe To This Blog by Email

My Blog Followers

About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

Dr. Kperogi worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States.

He was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. (Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta). For more than 13 years, he wrote two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based DailyTrust on Saturday (formerly Weekly Trust) and "Politics of Grammar" in the DailyTrust on Sunday (formerly Sunday Trust). From November 2018, his political commentaries appear on the back page of the Nigerian Tribune on Saturday.In April 2014, Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication. His research has also won international awards, such as the 2016 Top-Rated Research Paper Award at the 17th Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.